The Antoni Miró Research Chair in Contemporary Art was established in 2015 to promote and contribute to the knowledge and dissemination of contemporary art, with a focus on artists from the Valencia Region. Intended as a platform for reflection and debate, the Research Chair also explores the connection between contemporary art, thinking and other artistic disciplines, such as literature, music or cinema, among others.
This year, with the support of the Valencia Region Government, the University of Alicante’s Antoni Miró Research Chair in Contemporary Art launched a grant programme to fund exhibitions. Three grants have been awarded to cover expenses for materials and the publication of catalogues. Between November 2024 and January 2025, there will be three consecutive exhibitions at the UA Museum’s Cub2 hall to show the work of each of the winners: Empar Santamarina, the “Passejades per Xàtiva amb Estellés” group and Claudia Pastomás.
“La cruesa de la seua exposició” (“The rawness of her exhibition”), by Claudia Pastomás (Valencia, 1998), provides a meticulous reconstruction of elements that induce a sense of estrangement, as they feel out of place in the current context. The project examines the layers that emerge as forgotten production processes are analysed and brought back to life. Taking into account how the management of manual labour has changed between the Fordist and post-Fordist eras, as well as its influence on cultural representations, the artist offers an archaeological exercise that looks at history and the way it is told from a new perspective. She
investigates how old things become obsolete, understanding this process as something that is neither signifier nor signified.
This installation seeks to reinterpret pre-existing ways of doing and making, pre-existing production processes, in view of the need to negotiate and reformulate our independent means of self-representation and narration within the power structures in place. The guiding thread for the project is marquetry, artisanal inlay techniques that were traditionally employed for decorating furniture but which have seen a significant decline over the decades. Sensitive and fragile, Claudia Pastomás’s painting installation challenges the established rules by creating an “unfamiliar” space using wood veneers and an imaginary of hollow shapes and ornaments. Viewers can get a glimpse of the inside and discover manual processes and ways of working that have remained hidden. They are encouraged to test the limits of these processes, to explore space on different scales – the boundaries between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the obsolete and the new in market-oriented production.
